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Over the years I have read about trials or research work based on numerous fantastic discoveries in the field of HIV/AIDS. I have also read about a number of treatments which were claimed to do fantantic things in HIV/AIDS patients. For one reason or another information about such research just stop appearing in the press and people like me wonder what happened to such projects.

The reason I've started this thread is to provoke discussion as well as try to bring closure of such works in the mind of folks like me. I am hoping others will add experimental treatments they would like to get updates on. (NO QUACKS PLEASE)

I have a few that I could ask about but I will start with one. Some people might be offended because the claimed treatment was not made by our beloved pharmas from Europe or the US using "conventional" HIV theories. Please lets be open-minded and I do not mean to offend anyone on this forum.

If this goes against the rules of the forum, I apologise and I am happy for the thread to be deleted. So here we go:

Dr Sam Chachoua. He was on NBC claiming he had treatment that he believed could cure Cancer and HIV/AIDS. He handed his vaccines over to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center who later denied knowledge of such medicines or dealing with Dr Chachoua. He sued them and won the case (in the US court system).

The last thing I heard was he awarded some compensation money. Do any of you know why he just fell off the radar?

Interesting thread, especially given the 'now you see it, now you don't' reporting aspect plaguing some areas of HIV research.

Not to overwhelm readers, but there are three approaches, in particular, that I have been curious about:

1) The Johnson & Johnson gene therapy trial, with results that were been expected in February 2007 but seem to have vanished without a trace. There are one or two other current threads also asking about this.

2) That French/Brazilian dendritic cell vaccine that made such a splash in the media late 2004. Other dendritic cell approaches are being studied at the moment, but I'm not sure whether they're evaluating the same method/technology. Remember this?

3) I was about to say Dr Barbara Ensoli's big vaccine effort in Italy. This one is particularly disturbing given how long we'd been hearing about Ensoli, how much money was at stake, and the media attention (Ensoli became kind of a big name in Italy). However, I've just found this blurb about her from this month (August 10, 2007):

What's basically going on is that 'A leading researcher (Ensoli) for Italy's Higher Health Institute (ISS) is taking a prominent immunologist to court over his criticism of her experimental AIDS vaccine'

Jake = that's pretty close to my list too. I wrote to the Tibotec people via their website, but no response so far.Very interesting that you found an article on the long-lost Ensoli tat vaccine. The article states that phase 2 has already begun! I hope that's true. Oh, politics...

I actually forked out the money to read the coverage of the feud in Science magazine. I would have posted it here, but it was a couple of pages, and I didn't want to violate the 'no long pasted articles' rule. Plus, it didn't really state anything that wasn't in the free blurb. The Science mag article does quote Ensoli as saying that she plans to start a phase II therapeutic trial in the coming months. However, I am taking this with a grain of salt because this big court case is also supposed to start in a few months. I can't imagine a therapeutic trial getting off the ground if its famous orchestrator is in court battling someone over slander regarding the very vaccine that's supposed to be in trial. But maybe I'm wrong...I hope so.

On the positive front, I was reading about the Virxsyx (I hate typing that word and usually misspell it) gene therapy trial. As has been stated before in these threads, there's a Phase I/II trial going on between that company and the U. of Pennsylvania regarding its gene therapy and well-controlled HIV+ patients. Apparently in the trial, the participants get the gene therapy and then go off their meds to see if the gene therapy can control viremia on its own. As we know, Virxsyx is also involved in other trials (thank you again, Appleboy), so it's encouraging that they're considering using this approach in many different ways (and not just with meds, without meds, for treatment-experienced, or for treatment-naive).

I know that this has absolutely nothing to do with Ensoli or the other approaches that have been mentioned, but I thought it was kind of cool. Let's hope Virxsyx doesn't go the way of Amelia Earhart and some of the other potential breakthroughs that are being or undoubtedly will be discussed in this thread.

Can Dr. Chachoua replicate his own work and take the vaccine discovery another route?

Messer,I dont think it is as simple as replicating his work and then running with it. IF Dr. Chachoua's claims are true, how does the treatment get to the masses? From what Ive read he made some classic "mistakes":1. His claimed solution was not developed in a giga million dollar lab under some big pharma name. We are conditioned not accept such treatment. ( "If pharmas that spend millions of money haven't found a solution yet, who is he to claim he has?")2. He announced his findings using the "C" word (maybe wrong here). ("No, cancer and HIV/AIDS will never be cured, especially by cheap treatment").3. His claimed treatment did not follow standard suggested methods that might defeat HIV that have been followed for 2 decades now - mainly teaching the body to produce HIV specific antibodies.("Your methods have never been used before and there is no evidence of any prior scientific research literature").4. He has never produced data from accepted clinical trials. Well, it'c catch 22 here. Clinical trials cost a lot of money and the man does not have it. He tried to get Cedar Sanai involved but "something" stopped them from working with him. Instead they tried to bring him down.Most of these reasearch institutions are backed by big pharmas.

The point is, even after he has reproduced his work, in order for the treatment to reach us, it must be approved by bodies like FDA. We live in an era where partial solutions provided by big pharmas are readily accepted. Surely, if someone who has worked out of the box is claiming to have a full solution and there is no scientific evidence to suggest he is fake, shouldn't some body step in and check out his work instead shooting him down (the man was even sent to prison) using non-scientific reasons?